Measurement hostages

The MBA / business school logic is that:

'You can only manage what you can measure.'

But other (perhaps more systemically realistic) management wisdom goes something like this:

'If you don't know how to measure what you want, you end up wanting what you can measure.'

And nothing is more depressingly true, than how marketing performance is measured these days, and how this affects important decision-making.

Because it's almost impossible to effectively measure brand building ROI, a lot of this incredibly important work has been rejected in the last two decades, in favour of digital performance marketing tactics that can.

And even though overwhelming empirical evidence proves that most of a company's promotional budget should be skewed towards traditional brand building investment, the lure of measurability continues to hold marketing budgets hostage.

So much so that some executive teams are not even willing to have the discussion about reconsidering their promotional spend away from more easily measurable media options.

Data addiction, and an unwillingness to make any decisions without the backing of historical facts, is literally holding the potential of some businesses at gunpoint.

It goes without saying that there are countless phenomena that cannot be accurately measured that are most valuable regardless.

Ignoring these in favour of only considering feedback from simple metrics on a dashboard is obviously daft and deserves investigation as to why the myth endures.